With recent progress in communication technology, services offered by communication network operators to the subscribers thereto have also gained more attention. Among such services, so-called location based services (LCS) find considerable attention. For example, a subscriber may have subscribed to a service providing the subscriber with up-to-date traffic information via the network to his communication terminal. To this end, however, in order to provide the proper information to the subscriber, it is inevitable to know the subscriber's location within the network. Stated in other words, a subscriber currently being located in the Berlin area does not need to receive traffic information concerning the Helsinki area. Likewise, having subscribed to a yellow page service requires a knowledge of the subscriber's position within the network in order to provide him “only” with the relevant yellow page entries.
As mentioned above, the present invention is concerned to gather such location information on the location of a terminal attached and/or registered to a communication network.
In this connection, it has to be noted that the present invention as subsequently described is applicable to any communication network as long as terminals may change their position within the communication network. Thus, the network may support the use of e.g. mobile terminals in the sense of wireless terminals or even some kind of “fixed” (i.e. non-wireless) terminals which may however be connected (“plugged-in”) at different locations within the network. The expression terminal as used herein is intended to cover any such type of subscriber equipment. Likewise, also the communication network as such is not limited to a certain type of communication network. For purposes of describing the present invention, however, the subsequent description refers to a WCDMA (WCDMA=Wideband Code Divisional Multiple Access) radio communication network also known as 3G UMTS (3G=3rd generation, UMTS=Universal Mobile Telecommunication System) network. Nevertheless, other communication networks based on other or similar transmission principles (such as FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access) and/or TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) are also suitable for the present invention being implemented thereto.
FIG. 1 shows a typical example of at least those parts of the communication network architecture which are involved when the present invention is implemented to the communication network. The illustrated example in FIG. 1 refers to the 3G UMTS network architecture.
As shown, a terminal also known as user equipment UE is adapted to communicate via the network. Note that for communication the user equipment UE has at least to be registered to the network in a subscriber database (HLR/HSS) and attached to a communication network. “Attached” here means a state of the user equipment in which it is switched on and it is known to the network that the user equipment UE terminal is (in principle) “ready” for communication even if currently idle.
In communication, the user equipment UE accesses the network infrastructure via an air interface (not expressly shown). More precisely, the terminal UE exchanges signals with a radio transceiver device referred to as Node_B (in UMTS) (corresponding to Base Station BS in GSM). Each Node_B has a certain coverage area within which communication with the Node_B is enabled. The coverage area is also referred to as a cell. Each cell is identified by at least a cell identifier. Optionally, a cell identifier CI can be supplemented by a location area identifier LAI. The entire communication network area is thus composed of a plurality of cells. The location of Node_B's is defined upon network planning. Thus, a network management/planning system functional entity has a knowledge of the network topology and also of the cell identifiers corresponding to the respective Node_B's.
A group of Node_B's are controlled by a radio network controller RNC (corresponding to base station controller BSC in GSM). Of course, although not shown in FIG. 1, more than one RNC can be present in the network depending on its size/area covered. In order to keep the illustration simple, however, only one RNC has been shown. Note that a RNC represents an access control entity of said network, which is currently in charge of controlling access-of said terminal to said network.
Further, one or more RNC's are grouped for being controlled by a mobile services switching center MSC (3G-MSC) serving as a routing entity currently in charge of routing messages for said terminal. This means that the MSC switches calls/connections concerning a terminal of interest in that the MSC “selects” the proper RNC controlling the proper Node_B via which the terminal communicates. Depending on the size of the network, of course more than one MSC are present. A moving and/or roaming terminal may thus be present in the area of a MSC which may also be referred to as “visited MSC” VMSC. Associated to a VMSC there is a VLR (Visitor Location Register (in GSM) or its 3G equivalent functionality.
Note that in 3G UMTS networks not only speech (as an example of real-time data) are transmitted, but also packet data (as an example on non-real-time data) are transmitted. Packet data transmission takes place via a so-called GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) network existing “in parallel” and comprising SGSN (Serving GPRS Support Node) and GGSN (Gateway GSN) nodes. In the GPRS, the SGSN corresponds in functionality and hierarchical location within the network to the VMSC explained above.
Connected to the MSC/SGSN (which in FIG. 1 are shown as distributed entities) is a location determination functional entity SMLC which as shown is located in close relation to the RNC (although this is not absolutely necessary). A distributed SMLC may also be directly connected to the Node_B's. The MSC/SGSN and SMLC may in turn be connected to a gateway entity GMLC (Gateway Mobile Location Center). The SMLC, MSC/SGSN may further be connected to the network planning/management system mentioned earlier above (NetAct). Note that NetAct is a product name of a product of the applicant, which product name denotes an example product of a system provisioned with network management functionalities and/or a network management system. Thus, any mention of NetAct is intended as an example of such a product and refers in general to a network management system without restricting it to the actual product NetAct.
Also, it is to be noted that any network planning is effected in terms of network optimization. Hence, any reference to a network planning method/system of course implies that network optimization is involved in planning.
The GMLC has a connection to a subscriber register HLR (Home Location register) and/or HSS (Home Subscriber Server) keeping a record of subscribers having subscribed to the network and the services available to them. In addition, the GMLC provides for a gateway functionality offering a connection to the “outside” of the network, where an application (e.g. run on a computer device) is located. (The application may be associated to a service control point entity SCP of the network (not shown).)
Signaling between GMLC-SMLC and SMLC-MSC/SGSN is, for example, achieved using MAP3/SS7 (Mobile Application Part 3/Signaling System No. 7) in circuits switched as well as in packet switched networks, as shown in FIG. 1.
Note that the entirety of the SMLC, GMLC and other network elements such as middleware components and interfaces involved in determination of the position of terminals is also referred to as “positioning estimation and information machine” and/or location determination functionality in the context of the present application. The location determination functionality is under control of an associated control functionality adapted to control at least said location determination functionality, and which control functionality (not separately shown in FIG. 1) may be spatially concentrated at the SMLC and/or GMLC or spatially distributed within the network.
So far, the network architecture has roughly been described in order to simplify understanding of the invention. Of course, the entities described above may perform additional. functions as compared to those briefly highlighted above. However, a full description of the capabilities and interrelations and the interfaces there between can not be given in the framework of the present patent application. Rather, the reader is referred to the corresponding standards published by 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) and/or ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute).
In a further approach, the applicant of the present invention conceived to fetch network parameters from the base station controller BSC and/or radio network controller RNC using location based services LCS standard messages. (Note that with Camel ATI mentioned earlier above only Cell ID or SAI can be fetched from MSC/SGSN.)
The 3GPP standards are describing in a very detailed manner a variety of positioning methods and their retrieval methods. In addition to those, there might be vendor specific enhanced non-standard methods. This invention is not limited to a particular method nor is it important to understand whether the radio network or the terminal are answering either x, y coordinates or proprietary messages via the circuit switched or packet switched core network to the requesting entity, which could be GMLC or MSC. The location determination functionality and especially the SMLC functionality as such can be distributed throughout the network providing the x,y coordinates one way or another.
In general, location data of specified terminals is acquired in response to corresponding requests from a service application. However, for the present invention it is not crucial in which specific way the position information related to a specified terminal is determined as long as it is determined by means of the location determination functionality.
Acquiring the location data by means of the location determination functionality requires quite some processing capacity due to signaling/calculating to be performed in connection therewith. The entire location determination functionality has therefore been dimensioned to get along with a specified maximum of location determination requests that can be expected to simultaneously occur in practice.
This rated (maximum) processing capacity, however, is not constantly used as the maximum number of requests is not constantly reached but occurs rather seldom. Hence, at least part of the overall available processing capacity of the location determination functionality remains unused most of the time.
From an economical point of view, this is, however, inconvenient for a network operator having provisioned his network with a location determination functionality.